


notorious

by mornen



Series: I see a darkness in you [10]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Astral Projection, Biting, Bonds, Burning, Changing POV, Character Development, Dark Magic, Death, Depression, Haunting, Horror, Levitation, Magic, Minor Character Death, Multi, Pain, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rivendell, Sleep Paralysis, Supernatural Bonds, Torture, Unreliable Narrator, foresight, haunted, house of elrond, powers, supernatural powers, undecided on relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:46:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26936857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mornen/pseuds/mornen
Summary: There is a horror in being haunted. There is a horror in being the protectors of the world. Things fall apart, time grows cold, and there are many choices.
Series: I see a darkness in you [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025992
Comments: 5
Kudos: 15





	1. stain

Elrohir can see the present. It is a gift. It is a curse.

It is something he’s accepted by now.

It’s like falling, like falling with wings you don’t know how to open: Wings you cannot unfurl.

It’s like trying to walk on a sharp wire. It cuts your feet open. (Hey, don’t fall from there, darling. It’s too far to fall.)

He stands on the balcony, naked in October. Elrohir slides into his father’s dress even though it’s too big for him. He was cold. The dress is silk.

He stands on the balcony in the night air. It’s dark. Someone’s playing games with fire in a forest too far for him to reach, but he sees them. They might set the forest on fire. He can’t stop it.

(Baby, I want to cry.)

And then his mother’s arms are around him like, "Baby, don’t fall now. Don’t fall when you can’t unfurl your wings."

(One. Two.)

He wishes his mother wasn’t smoke. But she’s gone again by the time he can breathe: A memory, a piece of her soul she left behind. It hurt too much.

Elrohir breathes in. He saw it. That’s how they found her. Because he saw it. What they did.

Elrohir leans forward, and his father’s arms are around him suddenly, and his father’s arms aren’t smoke.

‘Come away from there,’ he says, because Elrohir is practically falling. He feels the edge of the balcony against his shin, and the ground is dark below but closer than it’s ever been.

‘Please,’ Elrond says and pulls Elrohir back. He cradles Elrohir backwards in his arms and brushes his hair out of his face.

Elrohir breathes out. He’s trying to remember how to breathe in. He’s a mess, and the dark isn’t helping.

‘I want,’ he says, and Elrond slides an arm beneath his knees and lifts him easily. He’s strong but anyone can break. You just have to hurt them enough.

They hurt her enough. Hurt her enough to break her soul into pieces. One of them is still left in his heart.

Sometimes it saves him.

‘It’s dark,’ Elrohir says. It is dark. That’s not what he means to say. What he means to say is that he’s fading, like oh god, he’s fading. Maybe his soul will become pieces too and he won’t know how to find them. ‘Please.’

Elrond carries him inside. Elrohir knows that he has shut the door to the balcony because the air grows warm, but he didn’t hear it, and he cannot see anything in the room even with his eyes open.

(One. Seven.)

All he can see is a canyon with feathers at the bottom, so many birds dead. Was he once a bird? Is he a bird? He is floating. Elrond isn’t holding him. He’s floating in the air on his back with his head bent, neck exposed, limbs stretched like he is in water, but it is the air. He knows this, and he can’t stop it.

Elrond can.

But he’s not there. He is, but Elrohir can’t see him. Elrond takes him into his arms again.

‘What do you see?’ he asks.

All Elrohir sees is fire. Somewhere someone is burning. He’s trying to speak, but the sounds are caught in his throat.

‘I want,’ he tries to say, but he can’t. Not any longer. He’s spinning in the air, isn’t he?

No, Elrond has him. Elrond presses him down, and he’s no longer floating, but he’s pressed to the bed, and Elrond is keeping him there, keeping weight on him.

(One. Eight.)

His eyes are all open, but he cannot see anything but flames and flesh burning. Hair curls when it burns, turns into ash. (Like a firecracker.)

_No._

But he can’t say that word either. Elrond presses his hair back. His hair is wet. He’s sweating. Sweating enough to make the sheets wet, the dress wet.

Elrond spreads his hand over his face.

‘Come back, Elrohir,’ he says. ‘Come back to us now.’

Elrohir wants to, but he’s floating above his body, watching it. His soul wants to run, but it has no where to run to. It’s a shame. It’s a pity. He’d cry if he could.

His mother’s fragment is beside him. It is hiding in Rivendell.

_Please._

Elrond is so careful. He’s too careful. He should be faster, rougher. He’s careful, and it’s keeping Elrohir above his body, watching the flames burn in the fireplace, watching the flames as a woman dies. She’s dead.

It’s a mercy that it doesn’t take long with the smoke, a mercy of nature held against the cruelty of it all.

He wonders if there really was a world unmarred. It seems like something you tell children to comfort them, but he can’t think how it is a comfort now: Knowing that there could have been no pain, but your god doesn’t care enough to save you from it.

(One. Nine. Six.)

He feels the pain of Elrond’s strike against his body. He anchors his soul to the pain on his flesh and tries to pull himself back. Another strike. Elrond is too gentle.

_It’s all right. Hurt me. (You can’t hurt me.)_

He can’t say it. It isn’t true anyway. He’s thinking oh my god as his soul quivers in the night air, and he’s leaving, and he could die this way, and Elrond knows it.

Elrond bites him. Teeth to flesh, and Elrohir rushes back to his body, and his eyes are seeing flames and the shadows of the room, and the shadows of his father’s hair, and how wide his eyes are in the dark, glittering in the firelight.

‘Oh my god,’ Elrohir says. He feels weak, and his skin aches from the sweat on it. ‘Mother was here.’

Elrond’s breath is fast, his heart is fast. He holds Elrohir’s shaking hands.

‘You need to bathe,’ he says. It’s practical. ‘And you will sleep with me tonight.’

Elrohir bows his head. Of course.

Celebrían’s soul shivers. The mirror knows he’s haunted.


	2. fall

Arwen can see the future, but the future is blurry, and she can’t say what will come true and what will not, because most of the choices are not hers to make. It makes her feel useless when she thinks about it long enough. 

In the wind there is a voice crying, but she can’t make out what it is saying. The mountains are treacherous, and winter is growing. Already the air has turned bitter cold a few times, and the ground has frozen. It will be a hard winter then. 

The moon is a crescent, and the night sky is blue. 

There is a need that is a pain deep inside her. But nothing will tell her what is is that she wants. She skirts the sides of her book with a pen, but she can’t think of what to write. The ink leaves thick black lines that don’t make words or pictures. 

She throws both book and pen onto her desk and looks out the window. Elrohir screams once in her father’s room. Arwen closes her eyes, but she still sees stars – a wide and terrible universe engulfing her heart and mind. She does not know what it is. She does not know why the stars disappear and leave a black expanse that is the only thing she will ever see again. Is it death? 

Elladan comes in as pale as death. He sinks onto her bed and stares out at the stars. 

‘It always hurts to see him like that,’ he says. 

‘I know.’ 

That’s why she didn’t go look. Maybe it’s to offer him some privacy, to not look in on his despair, his shame. Or maybe she just didn’t want to see him shaking, looking near death, his eyes turned obsidian, and electricity flashing blue and white in the air beside him. 

‘It’s going to snow,’ she says. The air is tight with cold. Outside the water in the air turns suddenly to ice. She feels it. She sees it. 

‘It’s so early.’ 

‘It is going to be a terrible winter.’ 

Arwen rests her head on her brother’s shoulder and lets him rub her back. He draws her close to him. He was fully grown by the time she was born. Sometimes she wishes she had known him when he was a child, but then she wouldn’t have been the same person born. But it still leaves him almost a father to her. Sometimes. Usually. 

She has heard from Glorfindel that their childhood was more troubled than hers. It makes sense. That her parents didn’t know exactly what they were doing. Elrond didn’t exactly have a stable upbringing, and Celebrían wasn’t half-elven. They made more mistakes with her brothers. That’s what Glorfindel told her, when he was drunk. 

Sometimes she sees it in their eyes. 

Elladan kisses the top of her head. Arwen watches the moon. It grows more golden as it sets, and the night grows darker, turning more black than blue. 

Still there is a pain burning inside of her, a want for something that she cannot reach or see yet. And it is burning with the image of the stars immeasurable. She falls into them, and she floats, and they are burning too fast about her. They are bright – too bright. They will die out. They will extinguish. They are burning too fast. She feels it run through her body and curl inside of her ribs, making a place where her heart should be beating. 

She grips onto Elladan so that she will not fall. She saw her mother in the room a sudden vision translucent with silver hair and then gone again.

‘Isn’t it too much?’ Arwen says. ‘Why do we have to fall?’ 

‘We’re always falling,’ Elladan says. Arwen doesn’t know if either of them know what they mean. But that’s what it feels like. Falling forever, waiting for the moment of impact when all your bones break, but it doesn’t come. 

Will it come? 

She lifts her hand in front of her eyes, and it is solid. She spreads her fingers, and she sees her mother between them, watching, terrified. Then gone. 

And that’s the problem. Because it isn’t her mother. It’s a piece of her mother, a fragment of a splintered soul. Will she ever part from them? Doesn’t that piece have to run across the sea for their mother to be healed? Or is it a piece that their mother gave to them in childhood that will never be gone? (It isn’t supposed to work like that, but they are half-elven, and that might mean they are greedy and ask for too much.)

‘I think I’m sick,’ Arwen says because the burn is still there, and the stars are all consuming themselves, and she is waiting for the moment when they all fail, and she is left with the emptiness that haunts her dreams and waking terrors. 

Elrohir she feels in the other room, half there, half gone. Elladan will go soon to help their father. She might, if she can bring herself to see it. She can’t always. Does that make her a coward? Or is she just what Glorfindel said, not as affected. Not as troubled. Saved in many ways because her parents were fast learners. What does it mean? 

She forces herself to stand up. She follows Elladan into the next room, but she stays in the doorway. Elrohir looks dead on the bed, but his heart is beating, and he is breathing. And sometimes she looks like that, but not as often, and that’s why it frightens her. Because it feels less predictable. Because it feels each time like the darkness might catch up with her. Because the darkness feels like a comfort in the end, a stillness, a warmth. And all the stars are burning too bright, too fast, but that is why she loves them, and that is why she may someday find herself burning like them, the way she burns now, but in a way that can never be caught or extinguished. 

And maybe she will love it: this mortal death that may catch her.


End file.
